Lecture Summary

Experiential Learning - beyond linear teaching.

Learning about who we are as designers, our practise itself and how best to approach and solve certain problems.  Within these lectures we've developed skills to help inform and develop are own personal practise which we will develop further across level 5 and 6.

We are here to:
- communication
- problem solve
- communicate through a common language that we develop- understand why we do what we do
- effectively communicate ideas, concepts and contexts.

Visual Communication:
- processes of sending and receiving
- level of shared understanding
- affected by audience content media and methods of distribution.

Visual literacy:
- the ability to interpret and negotiate meaning
- based on idea that a picture can be read
- all that is necessary for any language to exist is the agreement that one thing will stand for another.
- all based on symbols whose meaning results from their existence in particular context however some are also universal.
- constantly dealing with visual metaphors and how to construct meaning from these metaphors.

Chronologies:
- based on histories and importance of understanding history in order to move forward.
- challenge is how you develop and recognise other cultures and history and how to work within them.

Creative practise isn't a series of straight lines as you need to investigate and create the answers instead of looking around to what already exists.

Research is the process of finding facts.
These facts will lead to knowledge.
Research is done by using what is already known

COP 2:
Review information in order to progress in level 5.
- exploring discipline specific content
- developing individual areas of interest
- formulating research questions
- developing practical and contextual research skills
- writing research project proposals
- research informed practice and academic writing.

Modernism

Modernism emerges out of the subject responses of artists/designers. 

Modernism can be about

• embracing modelled techniques 
• making images that responded to sensations/energies of the modern world
• a particular sense of self 
• how the modern world helps us understand ourselves.
• reinstating order and control

All united by designers are responding to the qualities of the modern world, positively or negatively.

Modernism in Design:

- Anti-historicism:

Doesn't look backwards at historical atheistic, pushing things forwards. Modernism is about creating the new.

No need to look backward to old styles, Ornament is crime - Adolf Loos (1908). 

• Truth to materials:

Looking to the ways of making and celebrating them in there own material quality. Embrace the new world such as new materials (concrete, steel, new paint technologies). Modernism tends to celebrate these materials and celebrate what they are. Modernist painters tend to let the paint sit on the canvas sites of morphing it into an illusion.

Seagrams Building- Mies Van der Rohe 1958

• Form follows function: 

Places functionality before aesthetics as you solve a problem with the design and if solved efficiently the design will have beauty/ an aesthetic. Don’t design something to be pretty.

Seagrams Building - Mies Van der Rohe 1958, maximises amount of people to fit into a small lot, square is the most efficient way of maximising a plot of land. All glass to let light into the building. All rational solutions but celebrates the materials and new ways of working. Allowed to be glass. 

Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds 1938-78

Attempt at modernism as the utopia hasn't materialised. Modern world hasn't provided equality.

• Technology

• Internationalism:
• Modernist practices aim to create a neutral yet universal language, culture that is available to all. Tend to get styles of making that don't seem to belong to a particular country but could belong to any country. 
• Language of design that could be recognised and understood on an international basis.
• Ikea - embodiment of design for the world.

Harry Beck underground map:

Form follows function, to understand london at a glance therefore not typographically correct. Doesn't use the exact way the lines run of distances, strips system down to essentials to be legible and easily understood. This has now be replicated across the world due to its success

Move away form styles such as Cutlery from the Great Exhibition 1851, disguises materials as different about, doesn't follow form follows function. 

Bauhau Style Cutlery:

striping down to bare essentials, essence of cutlery. Very little decoration as is allowed to be beautiful on its own terms. 

Aesthetic that doesn't belong to a specific time. 

If you try and make your work fit a specific style at a particular moment your work will look out of fashion and old in a matter of years. Modernism looks to strip things down to their essentials which creates timelessness which shows the success of modernism. 

The Bauhaus: 

Re-invented the way art and design is taught in the spirt of internationalism. Interdisciplinary approach with photographers teaching typography etc. Created a diffusion of high art into everyday life, not just principles of craft objects but that would transform into everyday life. 

Herbert Bayers sans-serif typeface

‘argued for all text to be lower case’

Can even modernise typefaces. 

El Lissitsky 1924:

Reduces photography down to it essence of light but getting rid of the camera. 

Russian Revolution 1917:

set up worlds first socialist country, workers take control and distribute wealth so all would be equal and no-one would starve. People rule for the interest of the people. During this time you can't have a style of communicating that uses old styles, need to communication. Hyper-modernised went from being a backwards society to putting a man on the mood.